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This House Will Be Made Entirely Out of Trash and You Will Want To Live In It

Nobody has yet built a house entirely of garbage — or even recycled materials — that anyone would really want to live in. So Brighton-based architect Duncan Baker-Brown is about to do it. He’s going to build a modern, nicely-designed home completely...

Nobody has yet built a house entirely of garbage — or even recycled materials — that anyone would really want to live in. So Brighton-based architect Duncan Baker-Brown is about to do it. He’s going to build a modern, nicely-designed home completely out of industrial waste and construction scraps. That there above is what it’s going to look like.

There have been plenty of house-of-trash stunts and “awareness-raising” demonstrations: a hotel made of garbage to protest all the refuse floating around in the ocean:

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Art-ish design exhibits about the multitude of wasted materials:

And houses made entirely out of plastic bottles, because why not:

But we haven’t yet seen a serious effort to build a comfortable, modern, and marketable home entirely out of waste. The Guardian reports that the trash-home “will be built on the University of Brighton’s campus in the city centre from waste and surplus material from local building sites and other local industries.”

And here’s what it’ll be made of:

The walls will be made of waste timber products. Ply “cassettes” containing waste material will be slotted in between the timber structure. These cassettes will be removable so that new building technologies can be added easily … it will feature the latest eco technologies such as fully integrated solar panels, whole-house ventilation and a heat recovery system. It will be used throughout its lifespan as a pilot for prototype construction systems, components and technologies.

Far from a hippified save-the-world stunt, it’s a serious (and still plenty attention-hounding) effort to address the role of reclaimable materials in the construction sector. Remember, if we’re going to spark a successfully massive transition to clean energy, we’re also going to need to use less power in the first place. And an overlooked part of doing so is taking advantage of reclaimable materials for construction and manufacturing — that’s a key plank of one group of scientists’ plan to get the world running on 95% renewable energy by 2050.

In other words: in the clean-powered societies of the future, many of us will be living in houses built almost entirely from garbage.